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Layola Mond-Licht
= Layola Mond-Licht = Known Information Layola Mond-Licht, “The Flying Shadow,” was a precocious and wildly imaginative child. Born to Alyndra and Orion of the Radolond Tribe in the late Age of Zyte, she was inseparable from her beloved twin brother, Luro. While Layola was loud, wild, creative, whimsical, and visionary, her brother was the opposite: he was calm, aloof, and collected. They could sense that their differing personalities complemented each other, though, and so they were the best of friends. As her mind developed, Layola’s visionary powers naturally expanded, as was not unusual among the Radolond. She began to daydream even more than she had previously…and she discovered the ability to maintain lucidity while dreaming at night. When she told her parents of the wonderful adventures she could have in the realm of dreams, they were naturally very worried, for they knew that Dream Magic could act like an infection, spreading beyond their daughter’s control and dominating her life while sapping her sanity. Soon, then, they began to discipline Layola for her flights of fancy and constant indulgence in dreaming—they thought that they could “weed out” Dream Magic from their daughter’s life if they squelched it early. Over a few years of such repression, Layola came to outwardly match her brother Luro: she became obedient and structured in her habits as she grew into an adolescent, at the cost of her engaging enthusiasm. Her parents were relieved and nodded to each other when Layola could not see them, for they believed they had saved her. In secret, though, Layola still spent a portion of every night flying through the infinite realms of her lucid dreams, escaping the structure of her diurnal life through nocturnal discoveries. Layola’s early adulthood passed quietly because of the calm and orderliness she projected, and soon it was time for the Flight of Sparrows, when young Effendal would earn their common names. Due to Layola’s speed and agility, she became “The Flying Shadow” of the Radolond—and that night, strangely, her mother Alyndra presented Layola with the jewel-studded headdress that Alyndra had worn so often throughout Layola’s childhood. Gleaming with silver and diamonds to reflect the light into a thousand star-points, this headdress had always fascinated Layola even as an infant…and now, her mother wanted to pass it along to her, with a gravity and seriousness that Layola had no way of understanding at the time, although she knew that the headdress had been passed down through many generations. After the Flight, Layola was very highly respected among her fellow Radolond, with people almost subtly bowing to her at unguarded moments. At first, she assumed that this kind of reverence was simply a reward for any Effendal who had passed their Flight…but, in discussion with Luro, she soon realized that it was above and beyond any increased status that he had experienced. Indeed, she soon noticed that her exalted position mirrored that of her mother: she realized that Alyndra had always been praised and obeyed more than was usual for a good—but not outwardly remarkable—woman. Before Layola could spend too many days puzzling out this inconsistency, though, her visions came back to rip her joy apart. The Amalgamation and the Purges were only a few years away, as the Age of Zyte turned into the Age of Chorus, and they filled Layola’s dreams: fire and smoke and shrieking darkness that descended across all Effendal, not only the Radolond, and erased their culture and their lives with horrifying, human rapidity. No matter how much she dreamed, however much she used her lucid dreaming to explore possible escapes or victories, all her nightmares would end the same way, with the boots of the humans crushing everything she loved. Many other visionaries of the Effendal had similar visions, and she even joined a few groups that would attempt to sift through the dark dreams to find strategies—or at least hope. She could not give those efforts her full attention, though, because in the middle of them, her mother suddenly disappeared. One day, Alyndra had been tending the honeysuckle vine that grew to encircle the kitchen window…and the next, she was nowhere to be found, and not even Layola’s father could (or would) tell her what had happened. And then, suddenly, into Layola’s growing panic—the might of the Amalgamation marched into war against the Effendal, and there was no more time for questions or dreams. They fought their best, but despite Layola’s speed, she was captured along with her brother. When the soldiers saw Layola’s beauty, she was shipped off to be a slave, and she never saw her brother again: her last view of him was that of a smoke-stained face pressed against the iron bars of a cage, screaming for her. She was shipped to Dace and sold to the master of House Tremaine (the Dacian noble house that had first embraced the enslavement of the Effendal). Indeed, she was one of the first Effendal to occupy that kind of cruel captivity, before the slur “Elf” was even coined in the first place. The Master of the House, Dorian, took a special liking to her beauty, and she was forced to occupy the position of his favorite “pet.” He had her dressed in Dacian garb—without a mask, though, since she was still only a pet—and he brought her with him everywhere, granting her various privileges and luxuries because of her place by his side. She knew that her fate could have been much worse, and many of the other Effendal slaves resented her for her exalted position, but she still had nightly visions of her people being butchered in war and tortured in captivity. Driven by those visions, she made an attempt to escape Dace and Dorian Tremaine—but her plan fell apart at the last minute, and her punishment was lengthy and degrading, with the cold eyes of her master watching every moment of it. Tragically, in the process she let slip one of the few facts that she had truly kept secret up to that point: her ability to see glimpses of the future. With the punishment breaking her will to resist, Layola became obedient, and Master Tremaine was able to gleefully take advantage of her visionary abilities, gaining a great deal of money and political advantage thereby. This went on for many years: House Tremaine grew richer and richer, while Layola (kept away from all other Effendal slaves) began to forget her sense of self—and Effendal culture—amid the ongoing whirlwind of Dacian life. She was constantly kept in the presence of her Master, and in her isolation and emptiness, she even began to feel a close connection to him. She built a mental wall to quarantine her deep-flowing hatred for humans away from her daily life…and, on the human side of that “wall,” she even began to love Dorian Tremaine in a way. Her constant attendance on him meant that she knew him better than she knew herself—how he liked his coffee and whom he hated at court, along with his darkest secrets, deepest fears, family lineage, and so on. Eventually she even came to accept her role as his lover and mistress, thereby gaining a measure of respect from many humans around her. In this human world of intrigue, she naturally wanted to be her Master’s equal, and so she played the game despite being merely an accessory. Eventually, Dorian Tremaine came to favor Layola over even his own wife, and he started to joke about cutting Layola’s ears into a human, oval shape so that he could leave his wife and marry her. In this already-insane double life, Layola’s nightly dreams started to become more urgent and powerful. She seemed to be pulled farther and farther into the Dreaming every night, after the parties and intrigues of the day…and her visions were often of the suffering of other Effendal. Lost and out of touch, Layola became more naturally attuned to Dream Magic, but without any control over her experience: she tried to assert lucid control over the visions, but they simply spiraled out of her grasp. And when she was not asleep, her time was spent with Dorian…which led, fairly soon, to her becoming pregnant with his child. In the public human world, Layola had a graceful and perfect pregnancy followed by the birth of a beautiful half-human child named Tilly—but in the chaotic world of the dreams behind her eyelids, Layola grew ever closer to true madness. Her hatred of humans was still there, a knot in the back of her throat, but she loved her daughter, the product of her slavery and submission. Soon, she started having fractured visions of one day befriending a tall, white-feathered Celestial (who would eventually turn out to be Pynleon Zölest, known as “Pippin”), and so she urged Master Tremaine to purchase a very specific Celestial child—who turned out to be Pippin’s younger sister, named “V”—to be Tilly’s companion during childhood. Layola was able to take a certain amount of comfort in seeing her daughter and V form a bond with each other, even though she didn’t have any way of understanding how she could possibly become a “Returned” and form a connection with Pippin. At that point in her slow slide into madness, logic didn’t even feel like a possible approach to life. Indeed, five years after Tilly’s birth, Layola started to have visions of her own impending death. In her unhinged internal state, she could not tell if those visions were prophetic—but she decided to actively move toward that release by sabotaging her captors, even if only as a silent way of re-asserting control. For House Tremaine, this was a very profitable time and the House’s status was on the rise to ever-greater heights. In the shadowy world of her dreams, Layola saw a terrible storm over a dark part of the Torrent—and so she told Dorian Tremaine that a grand convention of black-market traders was going to take place there. Wanting a piece of such a mercantile opportunity, he sent ships loaded with riches and trade goods…directly into the maw of the devastating storm that Layola had seen. The ships sank, and suddenly Layola’s favorable position had sunk as well. Furious about what he saw as a betrayal, Dorian Tremaine was forced to pull his favorite pet from her role and to kill her. In choosing a beautiful death, he settled on elegance rather than ostentation: he strangled her with a fine silk ribbon, after securing her limbs with other ribbons so that she could not thrash around in an unseemly way. As her eyes went dim from the lack of air, she hoped that Tilly would somehow find a way to escape the Dacian culture all around her. Dorian had hired quality instructors to raise Tilly up to that point, so Layola was not afraid that Tilly would be killed or punished—but she was still likely to be treated as a novelty, and she would never know Effendal culture. And then, after oblivion, Layola Returned from death. On Tear, she remembered much of her life with House Tremaine…but she had no memories of her daughter Tilly and only vague impressions of her Radolond family and her previous life. She Returned along with Pippin and immediately felt a sense of connection (although she did not remember her previous visions that had prophesied their meeting), so the two of them became tightly bonded very quickly. Because of her limited memories, she actually feels more socially capable when speaking with humans, and Dacians in particular—but she knows that such comfort is unnatural, in a way, and so she goes to great lengths to build stronger connections to other Effendal. With little knowledge of Effendal life, though, she feels that she truly belongs nowhere. After building a connection to Kenrin Arakai, she became his apprentice in the magical arts—and, with his help, she found another piece of the puzzle that is her past. Through his connection to the Celestine Loremaster Gabriel, Layola learned that she looked exactly like the ancient etchings of an unbelievably ancient culture called the Astari…and she learned that her star-diamond headdress looked very much like an artifact of Astari origin. The Astari were apparently a culture of proto-Effendal diviners and prophets who prayed and sacrificed to the wise dragons of their time to receive visions of the future. This connection might help to explain the particular reverence that the other Radolond had given to Layola and her mother…and, in fact, Layola surprised herself by speaking an old form of the Draconic language, one night in the tavern after trying a strong, stimulating drink. Status NA Allies * Pynleon Zölest (pippin) (Ward) * Varka D'nall * Fenbros * Cestalagos Dîr Cellagar * Kenrin Arakai (Layola is Kenrin's apprentice) * Isiya (Layola's Cousin) * Jasper Enemies *The Dacian house of Tremaine *Any who seek to oppress Effendal Obituaries * Rumors *Has a soft spot for a certain human *Give her Klava for a good time *Do not be fooled by Layola's beauty, as her affinity to magic is so much deadlier *Some hypothesize that Layola is not even returned but divined where newly Returned would show up and inserted herself into the group. *Even with her hatred towards humans, Layola has stronger bonds to humans than Effendals *Layola's crown is made out of her own tears she wept during her time in captivity. *If you feed Layola a very rare and specific beverage, she will gain the speed of a stag, and the endurance of... something that has a lot of endurance. *Rumor has it, Loyola is a Grandmaster Blood Mage, because moving as fast as she does is impossible without magic *There is a minor rumor that the Returned may be better off without Layola, but the vast majority of the Returned seem to be staunchly opposed to this far-fetched thought. *"Some say, amongst her folk, her magic can draw down the very moon itself; To what voice could have such celestial bodies bend an ear and spare such company? Her voice, and her voice alone." *Layola is V *Hiding behind the innocence in her eyes lurks a hunger and desire only Sekril seems to envoke within her. Perhaps it is time for the man of the night and the princess of the moon to meet in the light. *Rumor has it Sekril is the Darkness and Pippin is Layola's Light *Rumor has it Layola enjoys the company of humans more than Effendals *Layola shrives on the attention she gets from interacting with Sekril *Layola has an affinity for the moon and the night sky. Perhaps it means something to her. *It is said that she has begun the study of Blood Magic, and that her latest flame, Sekril, was seen purchasing scrolls for her. *Rumor has it that Lyola is being courted by a Drir, and her current flame Sekril hasn't taken it very lightly. *Rumor has it, Layola loves cookies!!! Inspirations Chise (Ancient Magus Bride), 2b (Nier Automata), Daenerys Targaryen (Game of Thrones), Rinoa Heartilly (Final Fantasy VIII), Homura (Madoka Magica), Soundtrack Weight of the World Mirror- Ellie Goulding The Home we Made- Crywolf UNRAVEL- Jonathan Young Once Upon a Dream- Lana Del Rey Category:Player character